Hi there, thanks for bringing this up
On 9 March 2012 17:36, Robert Sanderson <azaroth42@gmail.com> wrote:
> Dear all,
>
> Can we please clarify something regarding the scope of the Comment
> class, as regards to annotations in general. Annotations are
> typically divided into three nodes, the Comment (or body), the
> Annotation itself, and the resource being annotated (the Target of the
> annotation). Our understanding of the proposal is that the Comment
> represents only the Body of an annotation?
I don't think there's a simple direct answer, since your question is
couched in terms of a subtly different way of thinking about
(representations of) commenting.
The Microdata (or RDFa) assertions *about* the comment (and its
target), in some ways can be thought of (if a noun is needed) as being
a kind of annotation. They're not necessarily packaged up as a third
concrete entity, Annotea-style, but they often do some of the same
work. Bear in mind that our basic starter scenario here is something
like a simple blog comment. I believe we can build out from there, and
hopefully find common ground with more sophisticated annotation
systems as well as with (for example) efforts around structured dialog
and debate. For the latter I tend to cite http://debategraph.org/home
but there are plenty of others, for example
http://projects.kmi.open.ac.uk/compendium/
> Thus, a Comment does not link to the Target, that would be left for
> another class of object like an Annotation?
A Comment, like any CreativeWork, can have an 'about' property that
references "the subject matter of the content."; so that basic
association can be handled with existing properties. Perhaps if you
wanted to attach a comment to an image, and say where in the image it
was attached (or give an SVG path outline), then reifying the details
into an additional node be useful. But we have lots of evidence that a
simple Comment class will be appreciated too. I don't believe a single
representation will meet everyone's needs, but we should make sure at
a minimum that any equivalences we identify get documented properly.
There is certainly scope for more work and richer models: image and
media annotation, scientific and journalistic argumentation models,
etc. I hope we can move towards those, and have more collaboration
here that adds richer layers later. But I hope also we can proceed
with adding this basic building block asap. Does that make sense from
your perspective?
> The W3C Open Annotation is very excited to ensure that the two proposals can work hand in
> hand, rather than compete for mind space.
I'm sure they can fit together nicely, and I very much look forward to that!
cheers,
Dan
ps. for those not familiar with this work, check out
http://www.w3.org/community/openannotation/
and nearby, http://code.google.com/p/annotation-ontology/http://www.openannotation.org/spec/beta/
> Thanks!
>
> Rob Sanderson, Paolo Ciccarese
> W3C Open Annotation Community Group Co-Chairs
>